Microsoft Releases 64-bit W2K to Developers

Microsoft Corp. today released a new, optimized version of Windows 2000 specifically designed for Intel’s 64-bit Itanium processor.

This is not the first developer’s release of 64-bit Windows 2000, but it will more closely resemble the final version when it is released. In addition, Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) and Intel Corp. (www.intel.com) released software developer kits and driver developer kits for developers to take advantages of all of the software and hardware’s new features.

Microsoft and Intel also created a web farm of multiprocessor Itanium servers for developers who do not have Itanium machines on hand to test IA-64 applications. Microsoft expects developers to create and compile their applications on 32-bit machines, then test and deploy on 64-bit machines.

Intel expects that many early adopters of Itanium will be interested in high-end scientific applications, creating demand for both servers and workstations. Consequently, Microsoft has released both workstation and server flavors of Windows 2000 to developers.

The companies also expect enterprises needing high performance databases to deploy Itanium. Michael Stephenson, lead product manager at Microsoft for 64-bit Windows enterprise servers, says Itanium machines will be able to store considerable quantities of database information in RAM, rather than disk storage, increasing the availability and performance of databases. - Christopher McConnell